Miscellaneous
Obama's sudden rise in the polls is a complete shock to me. At this point, I'm predicting John McCain to get under 200 electoral votes. Although my model doesn't implement any sense of momentum, I do believe that public opinion has momentum, for reasons that I'll post about at some other time. I think this is likely to top out at about a 6% lead.
Wow, Sarah Palin acknowledges up front that she doesn't plan to answer the moderator's question.
I love Joe Biden's smile. Every time Sarah Palin throws a zinger his way, he gets a big white smile. I think it's a great strategy for deflecting Sarah Palin without seeming like a jerk, and moreover I love to watch people who love what they're doing.
Did I get that right that Sarah Palin wants to be an active President of the Senate? I'm pretty sure that John Adams was the last one to try that, and it was a dismal failure.
I see there's a kerfuffle between 538 and RCP about which polls RCP uses. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I want to mention which polls I use. I use all polls posted on Pollster.com except 1) Internet-only polls and 2) polls that survey adults rather than RV or LV. When a pollster presents both RV and LV results, I favor the RV results for polls taken before the close of the Republican convention, and LV results for polls taken since then.
I just tuned into MSNBC in time to hear Keith Olbermann finishing the question "...draw be sufficient at 33 days out, or is every day that they don't gain up any ground on Obama a disaster?" This is the right question to ask, and the answer is pretty close to "It's a disaster."
Linda Lingle is now talking. She's a Republican governor, has proved her ability to get votes in a blue state, is knowledgeable about issues, is female, is from an unusual state, and was mayor of Maui County, which is four whole islands -- much bigger than Wasilla. Why didn't John McCain pick Linda Lingle for VP?
Obama's abandoning of ND was not a surprise. McCain's abandoning of MI is a surprise to me, but I believe is the right call. At this point, McCain needs to pick a single minimal winning coalition of states, and go all-in in those states to eke out an electoral win. The easiest winning combination for McCain is to win IN, MO, FL, VA, OH, NV, and CO, and to lose NH, MI, PA, NM, and WI. For a while, Obama looked like he was struggling in MI, but Obama has gained about half a percent in MI relative to the US over the summer as the rancor over the primary receded. At this point, Obama leads by over 7 there, and McCain is wise to pull out, even if his move is embarrassing.
posted by Benjamin Schak at 10:46 PM
3 Comments:
I'd be curious to know what you think on a few topics. First, the cellphone polling issue. In '00 and '04 I didn't give this any credence, but this year I do. The telecommunications statistics show a big rate of wireline replacement, and the studies of cellphone users say that they're more likely to be youth and minorities.
I seem to recall something on 538.com saying that cellphone undercounting cuts Obama's margin by 2-3%. Seems to me that this could be the difference between a relatively narrow win (the current media consensus) and an Eisenhower-level landslide.
Next issue is related but not the same. In '04, black voter participation was 56%. This year, I've got to think that voting for Obama is going to be virtually a quasi-religious issue in the black community and that we'll get an utterly massive increase in that cohort, on the order of, say, 80%+ turnout. What would the numerical impact of an 80% black turnout be? Or 70%? Plus, of course, a change from 5-10% black support for the Republican to 3% this year.
Next issue. There seems to be, at least in some surveys, an underrepresentation of the youth vote. Everything I've been hearing points toward a big youth vote this year, and a heavily pro-Obama one? What do you think, and how accurately do you think the polling has captured it?
Next issue. I am told that Obama's volunteers are registering LOTS of new voters this year. These RV and LV surveys, are they picking it up? I realize that new voters overlap with black, youth, and cellphone-only, so I'm wondering what the aggregate effects are from all these factors.
Next issue. Are there any under-the-radar factors that work for McCain this year? How about, say, the "Bradley Effect?" 538.com says it won't be a factor, and that in fact there could be a "reverse Bradley Effect." What do you think?
I realize I've listed a whole lot of things. I love your site and, hell, I figured I'd give you some topics to write about if you care to. Keep up the great work!
Hey anonymous, thanks for stopping by.
Honestly, I know next to nothing about polling methodology. Generally speaking, I just let pollsters handle their methodology, and take their results at their word.
I've heard numbers in the 2-3% range, same as you. I think I've seen that some pollsters are doing some things to try to account for this, such as making calls to cell-phone-only lists, but I don't know how effective that'll be.
Of course, we all heard the same thing about cellphone undercounting in 2004, and it turned out not to matter at all.
I'd like to know the geographical distribution of cellphone-only people. If it's by-and-large a bunch of young people in places like NY and CA, then the effect will be diminished, since the states Obama would pick up with a further 2-3% swing are NC, WV, ND, and MT.
A jump in the Obama vote by 25% of the African-America population would be about a 6% boost. He would win easily nationally and electorally, and would possibly pick off some unexpected southern states.
I'm doubtful that something so dramatic can happen, though. I remember from coordinating get-out-the-vote efforts in parts of highly-segregated Philadelphia that the number of registered voters seemed higher in most Black neighborhoods than in most White neighborhoods because of higher rates of turnover in the population. As a result, the official voter participation percentages tended to be lower than the reality, which was that people in the Black and White precincts voted at roughly the same rate.
To throw a number out there, I'll predict an uptick of 5% in Black voter turnout, which would translate into about 1% of the overall vote. Whether wise or not, I'm counting on the pollsters' LV models to sort this out.
The voter reg efforts are great, but they're something that Dem campaigns talk about every time. In 2004, the great new thing was that outside groups were doing tons of new voter registration. Problem was, Republicans were doing lots of voter reg too. This year is a little different -- Republican grass-roots seems minimal --, but Democratic voter reg is a never-ending battle against voter mobility. There's also the question of whether Obama is tracking those registrants well enough to turn them out on election day. My sense is yes, but the jury won't come in until November. Overall, I'd give this maybe a 0.5% effect, much of which should appear automatically in an effective LV polling model.
I read some articles about whether the Bradley Effect has disappeared, or whether the Bradley Effect caused Obama to lose NH in the primaries. I don't think there's enough data to be sure, but I agree that the best evidence indicates that the Effect doesn't exist. Let me put it this way: If the Effect still existed, it definitely would have reared its head in TN-Sen-2006 between Corker and Ford.
I also suspect that the robo-surveys, such as Survey USA, help eliminate the Bradley Effect.
(By the way, I'm one of the most problematic people for pollsters: I'm a cellphone-only voter, my cellphone's area code belongs to a state I don't live in, and I never pick up unless I recognize the person who's calling. I've also never missed an election big or small, general or primary, local or national.)
I see here a link to a paper that looks pretty decisive to me against the existence of the Bradley Effect. Case closed.
The talk about the Bradley Effect might be a better example of observation bias, actually. That is to say, the real effect was that observers chose to make a fuss about Dinkins's underperformance against Giuliani, but were willfully ignorant of Dinkins's overperformance against Koch.
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